


and he's giving me the evil eye

by franzferdinand



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Possibly OOC?, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Self-Indulgent, a reflection on their childhoods, basically works on a theme of restraint & cages, everyone is sad and it's not okay, i'm trying to get a handle on their characters, ish, warnings possibly added later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-01-20 15:58:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18528346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/franzferdinand/pseuds/franzferdinand
Summary: They have been trapped all their lives. They have been trapped with each other and isolated away from each other, trapped with the horrors of their childhoods and kept from what could have been. They are, all of them, still feeling the shackles that were on their wrists for so long. It is easy to forget how to be free.





	1. The First

**Author's Note:**

> So. . . first work in this fandom! I'm trying to get back into writing, and I plan on doing a chapter for each of them. I just needed to post this one before I could convince myself to work on the others, I think. Please comment if you want to see more from me! I'm considering either writing something set during their upbringing or after they've traveled into the past. 
> 
> I'm also totally open to requests! Chat with me about anything else UA you'd like to see, au or not, or ask if there are any other fandoms we share! 
> 
> Title is from "Lipstick Licking" by Milburn.

They’ve been running as long as they can remember. That’s the problem with cages. As soon as the door opens, you’re off. Even when your muscles ache, your lungs catch fire, when you’ve lost the landmarks and you don’t know where you are, you have to keep running. Even when you’ve forgotten why you’re running, the idea of stopping is too terrifying to consider. The solid ground seems too likely to grow vines around your ankles and tie you down again. 

There are seven of them. It’s a large number, for women willing to sell their children, but they suppose the extenuating circumstances make it a little more reasonable. They’d be lying if they said they didn’t wonder about their birth mothers—who were they, anyway? Whose horror was it to be struck with a child, that pain all of a sudden? It was easy to feel like a curse. Cursed children born from cursed wombs. 

The problem with Hargreeves is that he insisted on calling them gifts. It slid off his tongue so easily, so rightly. Your gifts. Your abilities. Your powers. The words felt sour on their tongues. Who would call this a gift? Who, staring down at their hands and wishing they were something else, anything else. Wishing on them weakness, wishing you could be anything but what you were. It meant, too often, looking at your skin as though it was going to slide off and reveal the ugliness inside. It was wondering if you feared that or craved it, craved the honesty of it. The monsters, figurative and literal, were swimming underneath the surface. At some point, it was easier to detach. This body was not yours, this voice did not have your voice. It was flesh, it was sound, it was not you. It could not be.

\--

The first one was the last one to look at the body that encased him with true horror. He had spent his life in bones wrapped in a body that was reliable, a body that twisted and strained and pushed when he ordered it to, when father ordered him do. Quick-step soldiers, yes-sir no-sir. 

There was pain. Of course there was pain. The training that tore his skin and over-worked his muscles could not be ignored, but it could be rationalized. The voice in his head (the voice that always seemed like father’s, when he listened hard) was fast to explain it all away, He needed to feel the strain to know his limits, to know how to push through them. He had to push himself or he would never be worth anything, would never be better than any other man with too much care for his body. But this was his birthright. His gift. The strength that had crushed metal and splintered wood when he was a toddler was what would save the world, so his father would say. He was a Hercules and the world was full to bursting with labors made for him. He was the first to charge in, he was the first one at the front lines taking the bullets that his siblings could not withstand.

So he had to train. So he had to let the callouses form on his fingers and the sores on his feet and the aches settle deep into his bones. It hurt, but it had to hurt. He was Number One. He was the leader. If he couldn’t take his training, then his siblings would lean into it, they would tear at the open wounds and find it acceptable to relax. To ignore their training. That was unacceptable. They saw his as the easiest, he knew. He knew they thought he just worked out, studied moves and tactics and destroyed dummies over and over again. Caught up in their own fears, how could they look into his life and see those private words that father gave him? Their own private hells had always been too private.

What gave him the most anger, the most resentment, was that they didn’t understand. That simple fact wrested all of the control he clung to from his fingers. Just as he began to try, to reach out to the others, they would twist his words, or give him some falsehood about what they saw his childhood as like. They didn’t understand how difficult it was to be a leader. Diego ( _Number Two_ , the voice hisses. _You do not have names_ ) tries, Diego tries to take leadership onto himself, but that didn’t matter. At least not to father. Diego could have all the delusions of grandeur he liked, but it was One who received the warnings. One who received the beatings. He was a role model. He was the ideal for his siblings, for this new breed of superheroes. 

It was a lot to rest on the shoulders of a child. 

But still they resented him. But still they hated him. Even now, reassembled, he was the bully. He found father’s words slipping into his mouth without him noticing until they were out in the open air, hanging ugly for all to see. They did not, could not understand. 

It had to all mean something. When he had returned to earth, that was the burning desire in his heart—to make it all mean something. To justify the grotesque mass his body had become, to justify his isolation. He supposed that the rest of them had all grown used to their pains, had already torn themselves from the academy and the family and had grown scar tissue over the wound. Those tears were still fresh in him, and they would be for a while. 

But, of course, it had to be for nothing. It had to be bullish determination all for naught, it had to be just another gilded cage—and barely gilded at that. The moon had just been a red herring. His body a horrific accident. He had been tied down for so long that at some point he forgot what it was like, and it was like a ghost behind him. The façade broken, the mirrors cracked. There was nothing for him to lean on, nothing for him to base himself on. His personality had been both leadership and subservience, a leader leashed by a proud man. And now that was all gone. It wasn’t that his childhood had been a lie—he could still convince himself, somehow, that he was meant to direct the group. Maybe that was true. But that didn’t give him purpose. 

All he could do was wait and wonder. Wonder why he had spent four years alone, more alone than he had been at the house. Even if father was cruel, he was father. And Pogo, mother. . . they were something. He could never forget that. But they were almost all gone. His siblings were learning to hate him, and he was alone, waiting for the world to end.

The days snowballed. The feelings grew, conflicting. He rediscovered Allison and lost her all over again. He was learning to see his siblings again, learning to look through their lenses. The light was bursting around him, surrounding them, tugging at their flesh and morphing them. They were going back. He was becoming human all over again with the promise of being different. He could only hope to live up to his potential.


	2. The Second

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second part. I'm trying to do this daily, since I know I'm perfectly capable. It's cathartic, I think. Reminds you you can still do it! 
> 
> Same notes as always: let me know if you have any requests, comment any opinions/thoughts! The fandom is a little crowded right now, of course, but all that means is more pairs of eyes have the potential to see this! 
> 
> Diego is harder and easier at the same time than Luther. I think each chapter will try to emulate how they feel about the situation, as well as how it looks from the outside, if you find yourself noticing the voice changing a bit. Certainly easier to get into the headspace that way.

The second had always been trapped by their father. Always second, always trapped in the shadow of his brother. It stung him like the knives he wore, like a constant prickling in the soles of his feet. How dare they have the audacity to treat him like something lesser, like something that just scraped by unnoticed? He was as special as the rest of them, numbers be damned. They were blind to all the times he had to stand there, twenty, thirty feet down watching his mother stand their in perfect stillness. A target for him to approach and approach, never striking—the fear of that punishment was almost greater than the fear of hurting her. 

_Of course, dad never did care if he hit her. She could be repaired. He would be much more angry at the lack of accuracy. That was what mattered._

Perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame his siblings for their blindness to what he did. It had never been self-imposed. Dad had always been tight-lipped about what he did to the others, and all Diego ever had to show for his ordeals were the bruises, the cuts. And they all had those. In their childhood, a strange mass of obscurity and individuality, there was little room for the others. They were close, obviously, in the way scared children always were. But it was surface. They would lean on each other when they were injured, when the pain became too great, but there was too much of their own agony in their skulls to wonder at what went on behind the six other sets of eyes you saw across from the dinner table. 

Even if he had wanted to, Diego had never been a great talker. When he was young, it had been something else his hateful body had done to him—a defect, a mechanical error. That was how dad saw it, anyway. With his six spectacular freaks, there was nothing their bodies could throw at them that they should not be able to overcome by sheer force of will. Even, of course, a tongue that refused to work properly. Sometimes, when the nerves got too great and his tongue tripped against his teeth despite how clearly he _pictured the word in his head_ , he could still feel the ache around his ears from the countless cuffs it had gotten him. Even after he had reigned in his reckless mouth, he still detested it. The others might joke about his ‘silent defender’ act, but at least he could trust his body to act where he could not trust his tongue to speak. 

He learned to compartmentalize. That was the skill that his childhood taught him: to build his own cages. Survival got a bit easier once he learned to box, to box the contents of those boxes and keep everything under lock and key. 

Number Two thinks Number One’s problem is getting caught up in his mistakes. There was no action that he could take that he couldn’t sabotage, couldn’t trip himself up on. He would push forward, of course, because that was his responsibility as the first, but Diego could see it in his eyes; he was twisted up inside by it. He could fuck up and fuck up, over and over—he could leave his brother to die, unaffected. Still he would push on, but he would carry it with him. 

Diego knew better than that. If you wanted to lead, you couldn’t let anything hurt you. You couldn’t doubt your decisions. That was the easiest way to self-destruct. To have strength was to train yourself to ignore that voice, just as Diego did. 

_Or told himself he did._

He had learned to trim the fat at every possible moment. There was no time for second thoughts in a firefight, and there was no reason to have them afterwards. Suppose that was why he could bring himself to do what he did, after all. No doubts, no care, no nothing. He had told himself he was doing good, and so he was. He knew he was.

The world pushed back. While he himself was strictly ordered, always kept in line, that did not mean he kept in the order the world told him to. The city pushed back against vigilante justice. Patch stopped laughing when he told her of his exploits and started threatening arrest. He was a menace to society, they said, and the bulletins ran loud and clear: he was not welcome here. As if that would stop him. There was nothing that could stop a man who knew what his quest was, and knew how to achieve it. If his siblings would let the academy crumble, then so be it. He did not need them to do the right thing.

They didn’t even help when they _were_ reunited. All of them in one room, and it was matches and cherry bombs, sparks flying. Of course, dear old dad’s death had to be what would bring them together and tear them apart in one fell swoop. Of course it was the ghost of him, filling the room, that would remind them of just how bitter they could be to each other. How they had always been siblings, even if they didn’t know if they had ever been friends. Inevitably, they drifted together and apart—even Diego found himself remembering how to laugh with them, even if it was just on the inside.

Like most things, it wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t be. He supposed he would be the happiest when this was all over, when they had fixed the past, when he could get around to seeing if he could once more pick up his police radio. It would be easier when this was all behind him, all stuffed into a neatly labeled box.


	3. The Third

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gasp! Twice in a day. I'm on fire. It hurts because I think these are kind of bad, but I want them out of me. Then I can start writing something worthwhile. Plus, I feel like they're getting a little better. Maybe. 
> 
> Ditto for the last two. Hit me up!

Maybe she had trapped herself. 

In the nights where the mirror got a little too difficult, that was the thought that would creep into her ears. She had everything, after all, and had gotten it as easy as breathing. Easy as lying. Easy as leaning in and whispering. . .

_I heard a rumor._

She had learned to fear herself early. Learning to be afraid of what she could do was easier than doing it, but there was something in her that said that all of them felt that. She wondered if all of them felt that hate rolling off of Hargreeves in training, though. They could talk of apathy, of bitter anger at their lack of progress—but did he hate them? Did he sneer at the sight of them, order them onwards with a scowl to do more, tell a bigger lie? Whisper a man dead and see if you could whisper him back again. 

_I heard a rumor that_

The monster in the mirror looked like her. When she opened her mouth to rumor, it was that monster that rolled off her tongue, that dived into the deep corners of her to find the most creative lie, the most efficient way to clear the room of bodies. How many men had she made shoot their friends, their comrades? How many times had this little girl twisted reality to her whims?   
She couldn’t help being capricious at times. She had been young, she had been full of the cruelty of a child who was too used to the heavy hand of a man who would rather she was an automaton. He had called her narcissistic, he had called her pathetic and shallow and the part of her soul that lived under her perfect silver tongue would always hiss in return: _you’re right. You made me this way._

_See, I heard a rumor she kept going ‘cause_

It got easier after a while. It was almost too easy. She was a jewel-bright spider and her web of lies could be spun like it was nothing. Even when she knew that it was twisting tight around her, that this house of cards could only stand for so long, it couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. The beating heart in her chest seemed to numb, seemed to dull. She could stare into the eyes of her child and whisper silken lies into her ears, corrections of behavior, little suggested actions. She could almost see the creature, waiting in the corner, eyes bright, teeth sharp. Familiar as she whispered her child off to bed and whispered her awake again. 

When she left the house, she’d been free. It was the world her oyster, a beautiful woman used to being able to lie what she could not get on faith alone. No one had ever taught her that there was anything a pretty girl couldn’t get. 

_I heard a rumor that even when they did, she didn’t listen._

She was already famous in her own way, even if not in the way she’d wanted. She was Allison Hargreeves, she was the rumor, the face of the Academy. Who would ever suspect her? It had never started on the stage, penny plays waiting desperately for some talent scout to walk up and save her from destitution. It didn’t even feel like lying. After all, wasn’t she just telling the truth, ahead of schedule?   
It wasn’t that she was a bad actress. That was what she told herself, staring into the vanity, staring off into the darkness beyond the soundstage. She could get a part all on her own, she could shoot and rehearse and act all on her own. She didn’t need her power—but didn’t it make it easier? The world, eased for her, ready for her passage. The world had given her this talent, and expected her not to use it? It would practically be a sign of ungratefulness.

Wouldn’t it? 

Patrick had loved her at first. She would hold that near and dear to her heart in the darkest days that followed, in all the twisted forests ahead. No matter what the tabloids said, no matter what mundane rumors swarmed around her golden ones, she knew the truth, and so did Patrick. He loved her, once upon a time, when he could still believe that she was a princess, broken out of her tower all on her own, with nothing but her wits to save her. 

It just got too damned hard. There was everything, all at once. There was Claire, there was the acting, there was Patrick and everything she was too afraid to face. There were people plugging their ears at the sound of “I heard” in her mouth, there was fear at talk of rumors. The cameras flashed, the questions kept flying at her like bullets, tearing at her skin. At her lies.

_Who was she, really? Had anyone ever told her ‘no’? What has she changed that we don’t know?_

It was the business that stayed with her, even when Patrick fled. It was they who did not plug their ears at the sight of The Rumor, them who heard the words coming out of her mouth. It was almost a relief, but after a while it was easy to see through. They had never given a damn about her integrity, really. They saw the money that lived in her controversy, in her sparkling eyes, enchanting whether you liked it or not. The directors knew that everyone was helpless in the face of her, in the face of her grotesque charisma. They caught glimpses of it between takes, darting back and forth under the skin of the perfect creature before them. It smelled like profit. Like a curiosity. Freakshows had never been run for the well-being of the exhibits. 

Once she realized that, it was difficult to justify her powers, even for the creature in the corner. 

_I heard a rumor it stopped because—_

She gave up. The creature under her tongue gave up. The cage had been built, after all, the traps set, and she had stepped into every single one. She had built herself a gilded birdcage, had chattered herself into splendid plumage, but it had eaten her alive. She was hollow, now, and even words failed her. Her body was easy to shift, to change, to dress up, the movies kept coming. 

By the time Hargreeves dies, she’s sworn off using her power and she hasn’t seen Claire in months.

She can feel the hate, the indifference, from the rest of them. After all, in their eyes, she was dishonesty personified, no? They had seen her grow into a liar, seen herself paint a face on day after day. Diego had always kept tabs on her, Klaus had seen a few of the movies, but their empathy was distant if it was there at all. 

_I heard a rumor that you made your bed. Now lie in it._

She had done enough lying for a lifetime. 

If there was anything she regretted more than her disaster of a family, it was Vanya. She had been so caught up in finding her voice at the Academy that she forgot to look out for the one with no voice at all. They had all only ever looked as far as their arms reached—they could see each other on occasion, but no one could see everything. 

And now Vanya’s power was sound. It was like hers, something that twisted the air around them and twisted reality. And now Allison was voiceless. 

Perhaps now, cast into the past, she could teach them both to sing.


	4. The Fourth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fourth part. It was like pulling teeth.
> 
> Comments & kudos encouraged, my dudes! Talk to me about TUA!

What would you do if every room you stepped into was crowded? If everywhere you went, the screams followed? 

They can’t touch you, of course. They’re not real. But they want to. That they can’t will only make them angrier, will only make them scream louder. They won’t _go away_. 

It’s not that the ghosts are his cage. They’re normalcy, eventually, even when they feel like torture. He can’t imagine anything, even when he knows that the others think he’s crazy, staring at the empty air, hearing it. Maybe they just assumed he was insane when he was younger—one of them was bound to crack, right? No one could be raised by Reginald Hargreeves and come out the other side quite right, anyways. He always had been the weak one. 

But he wasn’t crazy. The ghosts were a part of him, to an extent. There were times, when they were young, when he had been lucid most of the time, that it almost felt like a privilege. No matter what his siblings had, what they could do, they were always blind to what was right in front of him. They could call him a freak all they wanted, but he knew they were real. They almost felt like his. Maybe that was what had been the most terrifying about the mausoleum, besides the cold and the dark and the rotting-corpse perfume it left him with, driving his siblings away from his side for days afterward. The ghosts weren’t anything he could control. They were angry, they were filled with rage and terror and they _screamed_ , constantly. Clawed at him with their hazy fingers, flickering in and out of reality. 

_At least the ghosts he summoned for the old man, even if they were torn to shreds from whatever had gotten them into that day’s paper, were usually just sad or scared. They had none of that burning, all-consuming anger._

The fourth was only safe in his cage. He had made it for himself, but he had craved it. Needed it. They all assumed it was weak of him, it was just some manifestation of his need for attention, for distraction. They’d all assumed it was a fucking _choice_. In a way, it was, but if the choice was between long nights of no sleep, of seeing twisted and mangled forms every time you opened your eyes, and being able to at least drag yourself out of bed every day, then that was a choice he was willing to make. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the others. They were his siblings. Really, deep down, they were good people, all struck with the exact same issues. The old man had instilled in all of them that strange, simultaneous feeling of absolute worthlessness and of being the most important people on the planet. They were the world’s defenders, after all, even if the look in his dead, dark eyes was always that they were disappointments. 

The drugs had started after he had broken his jaw. That, he thinks sometimes, was the start of everything. It broke his relationship with Allison, with the rest of them just as easily as it broke his bone. Jaw wired shut, days past either in the infirmary or the mausoleum, floating on a haze of morphine. That moment had been the one where he had finally, _finally_ discovered what could quiet the voices. Experimentation had quickly followed—the alcohol in the old man’s liquor cabinet did the trick, the same as the weed he could get in the alleys down the street from the manor. It was almost too easy. He was dad’s disappointment, the rotten egg, spoilt middle child. Who noticed if he kept taking his prescriptions after he was told to stop? Who noticed the bottles going missing from the back of the cabinet? Reggie hardly ever drank anyway, nothing besides the same bottle of scotch in his desk that magically refilled itself every so often. 

_Well, Pogo noticed. But Pogo didn’t say anything. Whether out of pity for Klaus or fear of Reginald, he’d never known._

He was the first one to leave, and he had never been more proud of a decision in his life. Maybe he wasn’t doing great, but he’d never been doing that great in the first place. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to be perfect, he needed to be gone. The old man had long ago realized that Klaus was keeping his powers down on purpose, and locking him in the mausoleum to get him sober was starting to take far too long. So it had just become school, and scoldings, and little else. Even the back-talk wasn’t that entertaining anymore. 

When he left, it was with a quiet terror. It was turning out far too easy; he had gathered his things, put on _real clothes_ , and walked out. And no one stopped him.   
_Ben had been a particularly rotten mood that day, and had pointed out that they never paid that much attention to him anyway._

For the longest time it was so, so easy to pretend that nothing was wrong. Plenty of people lived in the city off their heads constantly, many people drifted in and out of rehab, never going anywhere. For the longest time, he was one of them, the ghosts far away beyond the haze of whatever poison was in him this time. It was a bad life, but at least it was somehow _normal_. It was a life where he could be totally removed from his life, from his siblings. No one expected to see a member of the esteemed Umbrella Academy, a veritable superhero, asleep on the floor of a dive bar, tourniquet still around his arm. 

He had never expected to spend much time back at the house for dad’s funeral at all. It wasn’t like any of them (save Luther, maybe) really cared about him. He could get back in, lift a few things, and leave. No big deal. 

Except there was Five. There was the same hurry-up-and-wait that had been his whole childhood: have to be present, Klaus, can’t skip class, but we’re not exactly going to _notice_ you. When he was useful, maybe, when they thought he could reach out to dad as easy as a phone call, then they’d talk. They’d get angry, as though it was his fault they’d never bothered to understand his powers in the first place. He was a freak, of course, talking into thin air, until the thin air became something they needed. Wanted. 

Of course it would be his siblings to completely ruin a perfectly good last eight days of living. If Five had just popped in, told them of the apocalypse and tried to recruit them all for the effort, the answer would have been obvious: why bother? He had never much liked the world, anyway, and had seen enough spirits in his life that it was difficult to think of death as something particularly terrifying. He would have taken every pill he could find and hoped to drift off in a haze. No ghosts, no siblings, maybe not even Ben. Just quiet. 

But there was the war. There was Dave, and there was remembering why he had ever cared about his siblings in the first place. It had been his siblings, after all, in roundabout ways, to teach him that he could learn to touch the ghosts. To truly connect with the ones he’d lost. He was broken, but dear old dad had broken all of them, in their own special ways. They had learned to fear themselves, to fear each other, to fear the truth and the dead and the living. 

Now was the chance to change all of that for the better, so Five said. Stop the apocalypse. Save Vanya’s soul, or something equally melodramatic. Maybe, just maybe, to never build a cage in the first place.


	5. The Fifth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! It's been too long. School blindsided me and it isn't done taking its toll, of course. But I'm officially, definitely past the midpoint on this tiny little monster. Makes me feel better, at least. 
> 
> Kudos and comments are, of course, always encouraged!

The fifth had thought he was immune to cages. That was his power, right? Go anywhere, do anything. Free as the birds, anywhere on the planet or in the history of everything just a step away.

Those were the dreams of a child. It had never been that simple, and it never would be again. He could never return to those halcyon days of sitting in his bedroom, poring through books about time and relativity and imagining popping into Los Angeles for brunch, back to 1950s New York for some doubtlessly famous film premiere, and of course a night out in 1920s Paris to boot. Everything had become much too real all at once, and he had become alone. 

Well, mostly alone. There had been Delores, there had been the corpses of his siblings to chat to. But he wasn’t going to fool himself into thinking that that was anything approaching worthwhile company. He’d never been an idiot, and he wasn’t about to start now, apocalypse or no apocalypse. 

For the first few months, he got by on thoughts of his family. He could stave off wondering what happened to the world or gagging at the corpses, the pangs of hunger or of loneliness. He just had to think of what had been before. At first, he’d tried to convince himself proper. Explain how it was all good, really, how everything their father had done had been for their benefit. After all, the Monocle had been right about time travel, hadn’t he? To his confused, thirteen-year-old mind, addled with thirst and with starvation, it had almost been enough to forgive him. 

But he got older. He learned to survive, and he learned to be a cynic. There were no pipe dreams, no last hopes, no rosy futures. There was here and now, trapped. Out of time and out of place and terribly, utterly alone. 

He’d never considered himself insane. Who does, truly? Delores wasn’t a delusion, she was a logical conclusion. A man needs company, after all, and why not a mannequin? She was never going to disappear, never going to rot like the corpses that baked in the sun by the side of the road. She was perfect, and she was clever, and she was everything that little Number Five could have asked for to get him through this. 

For all his brutal honesty, he had never been able to get rid of that one delusion. The one his brain would always return to, no matter how many times he had scoffed at his own hand, wiped away the equations from whatever section of wall he’d been writing on. He could conclude a million times over that this was pointless, that all his work would always be for nothing, that he was wasting time and wasting daylight on something that would never come to pass. But it was always there. When he lay down to sleep and watched the embers flicker low in his fire, when he watched the thing that used to be the moon shine dully next to the stars, it would return. A chance. A slight possibility. Hope. 

It never lasted. Even when he had retaught himself to jump, to press through reality and step from place to place once more as easily as on a spring walk, he’d plateaued. Nothing was getting better and nothing was getting worse. Little Number Five, no longer so little, still caught at the breakfast-table demanding more. Demanding beyond what his skills could give him. 

On his fiftieth birthday, he gives up. He stops trying. He dedicates himself to the math, getting lost in the numbers. The numbers are what matters, he convinces himself, all those nights he spends with dust in his eyes and grit in his mouth as another sandstorm blows by. Every hour he wasted trying to jump forwards or jump backwards was an hour wasted, an hour brushed into the wind like everything else. He would never get back to his own time and his own place without the equations.

But that doesn’t work either, and the small part of him that desperately hoped it to is slow in dying. It is a little, vestigial bit hanging off the too-often hurt side of his heart, but by the time the Handler finds him, it is dark and blackened and the closest to falling off it has ever been. 

The woman is an anomaly. He did not have to be a time-traveler to know, but it certainly helped. Everything about her was wrong in the subtlest ways, the littlest details. Her posture, her clothes, her accent, all a disheveled blends of times and places masquerading as a unified, dignified whole. She is timeless and placeless and she terrifies him even as he shakes her hand. The Commission is a way out, he tells himself, as they’re cleaning him and shaving him and reminding him how easy it really was to bend and to stretch time. His ability was an asset, they tell him, and he can read the looks in their eyes and the words off their tongues and he knows they’re telling the truth. 

They have never seen anything like him before. The thought makes him proud.

The Commission saves him, but they almost damn him. It is so painfully easy to lose himself in the work, in each new kill. He hones old skills and he learns new ones and it is quite possibly the easiest thing he has ever done. There is a part of him that will always be a killer, born and bred, and it is the Handler and her Commission that bring the feral part of him to full force. He is a tactician, a statistician, and a murderer all rolled up into one and he can, at times, hear himself in some mock interview, perfectly poised.

 _I am perfect for this job._

For a while he’s almost gone. For a while it’s almost too much and he finds himself forgetting why he said yes in the first place beyond the thrill of blood on his hands. It’s good, he thinks, to learn to fear that part of him again. To put it on a leash and remind himself that the part of him that loves to tear and rip and maim is the lesser part, though it is powerful. It knows how to overtake the whole with dreadful ease, but he tames it. He learns to be better and he is better for it. When he is done being the Handler’s scalpel, the fear is the next obstacle, but not of himself. 

In his days at the Commission, Five learns to fear the Handler in the way most people fear their bosses. The absolute power over a controlled environment that the proverbial boss is given makes most people a terror, even when they aren’t power-crazed sociopaths like her. He knows he will never see who she truly is, will never learn her true name, and he is caught between being terrified of the thought and relaxing into it. It makes her a monster. It will make killing her so much easier. 

It isn’t that he didn’t know that someone would come after him after he pulled his little disappearing act, it’s just that he thought he would have more time. On all fronts, Number Five, newly little once more, is out of time. It’s eight days before the apocalypse, not just shy of eighteen years, and his family is not the fresh-faced thirteen year-olds he left at the breakfast-table. They are old and scarred and horrifyingly apathetic. 

There is Luther, earnest in all the wrong ways. He is the only one who would ever help Five from the start and he is the one he dreads telling the most. That bull, set loose in that china shop, will only ever lead to disastrous consequences. 

He had never thought that much of Diego, either, too caught up in his playing catch-up to Luther to be of any real use. Desperate and lonely and softer than he lets on, Diego is at least determined. When he had still wanted Hazel and Cha-Cha dead, Diego was his best bet. That was something. 

Allison was perhaps the most insufferable. She never got over seeing him as a child, as something that needed to be protected while the grown-ups were talking. Her voice drifted over everything, making assumptions and plans heedless of everyone else. It is not a relief when Vanya cuts her throat (siblings are siblings and Five would kill before seeing any one of his brothers or sisters hurt), but he doesn’t half wonder if some of the others see it that way. 

Most of the apathy rests on Klaus. He is careless like a narcissist, self-loathing like any good depressed person and with the mood swings of a manic-depressive on five different stimulants and about eight depressants. Which, he supposes, could almost be correct, in a twisted sort of way. He’s the easiest to goad and the hardest to shake. Five wonders when they got to know each other so well, and no matter how he racks his brain he can’t find it out. All he knows is that when Klaus called him an addict, it hurts the numb thing his heart has become more than he expects. 

He had never really believed Klaus about Ben until the very end. None of them did, really, and at the moment of discovery it was more than a little difficult to focus on apologies when their eyes were on the tentacles that saved their lives. Baby steps. 

And, of course, there is Vanya. His closest sibling, after all these years. Vanya is quiet and understanding and she speaks to the fear in him he doesn’t allow himself to acknowledge is there. Vanya is the enigma, a slow poison, creeping her way to destruction so softly that no one notices until it is far, far too late. Vanya had been the wrinkle in whatever dull plans they'd all carried with them from childhood to adulthood, Vanya was the toy they'd always had but never felt much like playing with. It was bad enough that their father was determined to neglect her, some punishment for a crime she had never meant to commit and did not even remember, but it was a cruelty of the worst kind that her own siblings should abandon her. 

He is resolved to do better this time. He was resolved to save his sister and to save the world and to twist the fates of seven helpless children into something a little less mangled. Something resembling a childhood, something resembling happiness. It would never be perfect, but it didn’t have to be. Little Number Five was secure in the knowledge that no matter what their past or their future held, he would leave no one behind.

He knew what it was like to be stranded.


End file.
